The Land of Deepening Shadow eBook

The majority struggle on in the distorted belief that
Germany was forced to defend herself from attack planned
by Great Britain, while the minority are kept in check
by armed patrols and “preventive arrest.”

The spirit of “all for the Fatherland”
is yielding to the spirit of self-preservation of
the individual. Everywhere one sees evidence
of this. The cry of a little girl running out
of a meat shop in Friedenau, an excellent quarter
of Berlin, brought me in to find a woman, worn out
with grief over the loss of her son and the long waiting
in the queue for food, lying on the floor in
a semi-conscious condition. It is the custom
to admit five or six people at a time. I was
at first surprised that nobody in the line outside
had stirred at the appeal of the child, but I need
not have expected individual initiative even under
the most extenuating circumstances from people so
slavishly disciplined that they would stolidly wait
their turn. But the four women inside—­why
did they not help the woman? The spirit of self-preservation
must be the answer. For them the main event
of the day was to secure the half-pound of meat which
would last them for a week. They simply would
not be turned from that one objective until it was
reached.

And the soldiers passing through Berlin! I saw
some my last afternoon in Berlin, loaded with their
kit, marching silently down Unter den Linden to the
troop trains, where a few relatives would tearfully
bid them good-bye. There was not a sound in their
ranks—­only the dull thud of their heavy
marching boots. They didn’t sing nor even
speak. The passers-by buttoned their coats more
tightly against the chill wind and hurried on their
several ways, with never a thought or a look for the
men in field-grey, moving, many of them for the last
time, through the streets of the capital. The
old man who angered the war-mad throng before the
Schloss on August 1st, 1914, with his discordant
croak of “War is a serious business, young man,”
lives in the spirit of to-day. And he did not
have to go to the mountain!

CHAPTER XXVII

ACROSS THE NORTH SEA

After my last exit from Germany into Holland I was
confronted by a new problem. I had found going
to England very simple on my previous war-time crossings.
Now, however, there were two obstacles in my path—­first,
to secure permission to Board a vessel bound for England;
secondly, to make the actual passage safely.

The passport difficulty was the first to overcome.
The passport with which I had come to Europe before
the war, and which had been covered with frontier
visees, secret service permissions and military
permissions, from the Alps to the White Sea and from
the Thames to the Black Sea, had been cancelled in
Washington at my request during my brief visit home
in the autumn of 1915. On my last passport I
had limited the countries which I intended to visit
to Germany and Austria-Hungary. I purposed adding
to this list as I had done on my old passport, but
subsequent American regulations, aimed at restricting
travellers to one set of belligerents, prevented that.